Usability prayers seem to have been answered with the new (beta)search in Second Life. The re-designed (2d) interface fixes some major problems that have been haunting Second Life from the start. The ‘alphabetic ordering’ and single word search query limitation are things of the past once this search gets installed into the main client.
Top 5 improvements so far:
- New result listing algorithms based on Google technology
- Multiple words don’t get searched as being one line (entering ‘nature, tree’ would search for exactly that, “nature, tree”, not advertisements listing both the word ‘nature’ and the word ‘tree’)
- Google search commands (AND, -, ‘”"‘) are all working
- ‘Did you mean…’ feature (adding suggestions to possible misspellings)
- Top payed classifieds are shown as in Google, a sidebar listing 8 or so (commercial) results.
Some ‘improvements’ I am less enthusiastic about are the object oriented search, where you can scan locations for any objects for sale they offer. This makes it virtually useless to visit the store, where a large part of its branding is displayed. A step back for the 3d metaverse in my opinion, where you want to elevate the 3d experience.
Then there is the top 8 or so of highest payed ads overall displayed on the ‘home page’ of the searchtab. Currently classifieds in Second Life are an open bidding for the top position in listings. The costs of these classifieds are anything between 50L$ ($0.18) to 100.000L$ ($363.11) per WEEK. Other then Googles Adwords system where you pay per click, you pay this amount regardless of return. The high max. price is a lot of money to the ‘prosumers’, the people with a passion for creating, and basically the ones that are shaping the Metaverse. By giving the ‘high rollers’ such key-exposure, at that cost, you increase the gap between those that are successful, and those that create out of passion.
Still lacking some key features
After the good and the bad in the new search, there also seems to be some stuff still missing. It still doesn’t have some kind of rating feature, which is disappointing to me. There needs to be another filter to separate the content that would be promotional to Second Life from the 80%-90% of junk. Right now, the ‘top locations’ are either free money, free sex, or the sims with the largest community based on physical location (Spanish/Latin community’s are huge) because its rated by number of visitors. This seems very flawed as it in no way represents the quality, or added value of the ‘top location’.
Furthermore, It is still the creator of the classified that chooses its keywords on which it wants to be found in a very, web 1.0 - metatag - Altavista kind of way. This means there will a lot of clutter in searches. I could list popular keywords such as live music, sex, shoes in my completely unrelated advertisement. Or add the names of my competitors in my classified, and appear above them in what should be direct search hits for these competitors.
Here is the demo of the new search system, as created by Linden Labs ‘Community Manager’ Torley Linden. Torley is famous for his ‘over average’ enthusiasm and way of expressing this for anything ‘Second Life’, even for a Linden.
Posted on: December 21, 2007 | Share on:
Abhishek Saxena on 
Sophie on 
Prokofy Neva
said on December 29th
I’d have to disagree with most of what you are saying. You can’t program taste about content. Content is put in, and it comes up in search. Google doesn’t produce “quality” — that’s why Wikipedia, AOL, ads come up as the first thing (no, I don’t consider Wikipedia to be a good thing). People click on it because it comes up, perpetuating the Google problem.
You have to get over the allergenic reaction to “popular places” and just ignore it and filter. The problem you’re having is what a lot of geeks have with search: because they use SEARCH ALL. They think that will give the best results. But it doesn’t. The search — and the world of SL itself — is more like amazon.com, where you have to pull down “books” or “games” to sort better, and make sense.
The search as they have it now in fact puts in many other metrics besides sheer foot traffic, so you are wrong that the places showing up now are those that are gamed or camped (whereby people sit and get paid just for being there). The mass taste of Sl may not be too your liking. Then…create something else within it and filter. Lectures about astronomy or extropianism or scripting classes or whatever is your fancy are available by sorting and putting in more key words.
You cannot put social controls on a search and skew it and nerf it to fit your own elitist sense of what is culturally or politically “correct”.
Ratings don’t make sense, as they are gamed more than anything in SL. Traffic is actually a valid metric when you skip past the first 2-12 gamed spots — and see merited traffic. Use search/places. I hope they continue to keep the tabs in working the old way, as the search all continues to be a huge grab bag — but still, it is sweeping a lot more through all of SL and finding more objects than before.
Linden Lab can’t make up their minds whether they want a world or a browser of Internet pages. We have a world. We need the yellow pages, not a Google of pages. It is not a browser that is needed, but a directory. That goes against all the Web 1.0 and 2.0 received wisdom about Compuserve blah blah but it’s simply not scientific to assume that everything in history repeats exactly the way it did the first time.
One real down side to the Lindens’ search is that they are saddled with the bugs of Google which they don’t want to fix until they get the newer version of Google which is supposed to fix them. So that means if you take something out of search, it can take weeks to show up if you put it back in. Very annoying.
I’m not understanding why you are finding it “virtually useless” to have all the objects for sale listed. I’m not wild about this because it does create a lot of clutter, and without links to travel right to the objects, it’s frustrating (it does list the coordinates if you want to struggle with the map and its coordinates). It means being in a mall makes less sense than it used to, you need to be on your own parcel.
Rick van der Wal
said on December 29th
>> In response to Prokofy Neva
I think you summarize it in the second line. You don’t think Google produces quality - I think its a great filter and does produce quality as opposed to the old Altavista meta tag based search for instance. It gives the people what they search for, quality result on their questions. Hence its not surprising I find myself disagreeing with your arguments.
When I have to explain Second Life to clients or people around me, their perception of it is the starter avatar standing in a junkyard of prims. When you enter Second Life and have NO idea where to go (bad bad Lindens), you start going by populair places, keywords, or just randomly teleport around. All are very likely to get you into that 80-90% thats still just random ‘trash’. Think of it as youTube, where 80-90% of the videos is trash aswell, (probably more, but for this example it will do). The biggest filters on youTube itself are ratings, related videos and ‘most watched’ (1 view per account - not counting bounces) - as opposed to most visited in SL (pageviews), or alphabetical order.
I thought it was funny to see you call me an elitist - because your reasoning is exactly that. You argue search is not broken, but most ‘geeks’ as you put it (this kind of talking down to the majority of users kinda gives it away) use ’search all’ - why do they do this? Who is telling them to do it differently? ‘when you skip the first 2-12 results…’ - That is reasoning from an elitist point of view, the expert user who thinks this is a natural way of filtering results for users. I’m sorry, but thats just very poor reasoning - and is likely to create a ‘perfect’ world with 1 user - you.
I didn’t say it was virtually useless to list all the objects in sale, I said it becomes virtually useless to visit that store, or at least less frequently. Its back to exploring the web the way we already do instead of challanging the user to explore rich environments stores CAN provide (and some already do, visit the Silent Sim for instance).
Good point about the cache though, if ths where to be true, I haven’t witnessed that. Dead ‘pages’ after waiting for that teleport to finish can be very annoying.
You may think a ratingsystem is doomed to fail (heavily gamed as you call it) but I think it would be a great replacement for the ‘populair’ tab and helps index search results better. You just have to find a good balance and I do think you can script that. (one vote per acount on the parcel, resets on new owner). Right now only 3rd party websites index places this way.
Overall I say your reasoning is mostly self-centered, your experiences, your ‘fixes’ to a broken search which should apperantly become community standard WITHOUT the help of the application.You assume I use search all - I am looking at what the majority uses and see a problem, a problem that has been only partially fixed by the new search. After over a year of Second Life I know my way around, but as I posted in a reaction on your blog - we are not the users the Metaverses have yet to reach out to.